Dave-H

My understanding is that Scanreg runs when Windows 98 starts, and if it's happy that the registry is OK, it makes a backup, on the first boot of each day only. All backups should be "startable" therefore, but I have had problems in the past with scanreg backups that won't restore, and never found out why. I have one rbbad.cab in my \SysBackup folder, generated late on Saturday evening. I haven't done any manual backups using scanreg for a long time, although I always do it if I've made a large change to the system.

Thanks jaclaz! The guy you tried to help on that thread wasn't too helpful himself was he! I have just tried removing the registry entry for the USB stick under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR No joy there though, when I rebooted and put the stick back in, it just reinstalled as two "dead" drives again! I'm curious, what exactly are "Upper and Lower Filter Drivers"? Not something I've come across before.

Thanks again guys. I actually already had that version of Ranish Partition Manager on my system, which I had completely forgotten about as I haven't needed to use it for so long! Anyway, the USB stick is seen by RPM, as a single 2GB partition, as I would expect. So, what's the next step Den? Going off topic, I'm now having the very devil of a job getting the sound to work again on Windows 98. The driver for the sound hardware (on-board Realtek AC97) will not load. Everything else seems to be back to normal. I did try restoring the registry back to as it was before, but this didn't fix the problem. I am also rather worried that four out of the five backups I had from scanreg don't work. If I use scanreg/restore in DOS, I'm offered all five, but four of them just throw up a "system restore failed" message, no reason given.........

Done that. When it's detected again, it still detects as two separate drives, which appear as I: and J: in "My Computer". Neither can be formatted as "there is no disk in the drive"!

I'm now trying to re-partition my memory stick as a single drive, but I'm running into a puzzling problem. To cut a long story short, I deleted all the volumes on the drive, and it still shows as two drives in Windows 2000 Explorer, but with "no disk in them". I eventually resorted to going into DOS (I can access USB drives in DOS) and using fdisk to delete all the partitions on the drive. I then used fdisk again to create one primary DOS partition, and formatted it with the DOS format command. It now appears in DOS as one single 2GB drive, which is what I want. However, Windows 2000 still insists on seeing it as two separate drives, with no file system on them. Do I need to install a third party drive partition utility to get this to work? The "DISKPART" command in Windows 2000 Recovery Console doesn't see the drive at all. I have tried it again in Windows 98 BTW, but with the same result, two drives detected followed by a system freeze.

Thanks for the quick response guys! The USBMPHLP.PDR file version is 4.90.3000, which I think is correct for a Windows ME file. It's paired in the driver list of the devices with IOS.VXD, whic id 4.10.2225, a Windows 98SE file. Is that OK? I will do a backup of Windows 98 as it now is. As I have Windows 2000 on the machine as well, would it be adequate to just use Windows 2000 to copy the Windows and Program Files folders to another drive? I have a drive E: archive drive where I store all my documents, with no system files on it, I could store the backups there. I could re-partition my memory stick to a single partition using Windows 2000 too if you think that would eliminate one possible problem.

Hi guys! Thanks so much for all this, and sticking with it. Just to let you know where I am now. I had already used scanreg to restore previous backups of the registry when I was experimenting with this much earlier on. It is an excellent facility which has saved my bacon several times over the years, and it's always puzzled me as to why NT based systems don't have it. Maybe the backup files would be too large or something. I have a Windows 98 Resource Kit utility which allow parameters such as the number of backups and which files are backed up to be changed using a graphical interface. I expect you're aware that no matter how high you set the number of backups to be, the DOS version of scanreg will still only display five of them. Very silly! Anyway, I tried restoring the backups of system.dat and user.dat that Den had me make. Unfortunately they wouldn't work, on boot up I got a screen saying that registry corruption had been detected and telling me to run scanreg. If I ignored that, after a series of BSODs the system loading never completed. So, I did run scanreg as Bill told me to, and of course it just restored a backup, presumably the last one that started successfully. Once the system was up and running again, I exported the Enum registry key to a backup, deleted it, and restarted. I then went through all the automatic and manual device installation procedures, which took ages of course, but I've now got everything installed again apart from a few peripherals that I seldom use. I'll deal with them later! The only thing still not working is the sound, so I've got to sort that, but it can wait too. So, I put my pen drive in the slot (I'm using that for all the tests now as it's the simplest device, if that works I'm sure the card readers will too.) I was very disappointed to find that nothing had changed! It's doing exactly the same as it was before I reinstalled all the devices. I put the drive in the USB slot, it says it's found a "Mass Storage Device". That installs correctly, all well and good. It then says it's found a "Removable USB Disk", then a "USB Disk". It then does this again a second time, as my pen drive is partitioned into two drives. Unfortunately, as soon as "USB Disk" comes up the second time, the system freezes. No error messages or anything. Sometimes the hourglass keeps going round and round, but the keyboard is immediately completely dead. The mouse carries on working for a short while, although clicking on things does nothing, and eventually that freezes too. It's as if the whole operating system has just stopped running, and I have to do a hard reset. After this, putting the pen drive in just freezes the system immediately. If I try and boot with the pen drive in, the GUI never loads, it just hangs on a flashing cursor. So, all that uninstalling and reinstalling seems to have done nothing. The driver being used seems to be USBMPHLP.PDR, in the System\IOSubsys folder. If I disable this by renaming the file (I usually disable files be replacing the middle character in the file extension with a tilda (~) BTW) the detection and loading procedure for the pen drive does complete. I then have two USB Drives in Device Manager, as I would expect, but non functional with yellow marks on them of course as the driver file is missing. If I reactivate USBMPHLP.PDR the system freezes agian as soon as I put the pen drive into the USB port. So, it seems that the loading, or attempting to load, USBMPHLP.PDR is freezing the system. Why? Well, over to you two again.

Ah, thanks for explaining that Den! Multibooter, yes I had noticed that the NUSB uninstall routine doesn't roll things back to normal very much at all! I use a USB mouse, but the keyboard is a good old fashioned PS2 device.

Sadly, no. Did all that. Why the ".ant" and ".pnt" extensions as a matter of interest? Any significance to those, or would anything actually do? A lot of things just installed anyway and I couldn't stop them. Well, everything seemed to go OK, but what's happening now is that when I insert the pen drive, I'm offered two possible drivers, "Mass Storage Device 11/16/07" and "Mass Storage Driver 4/22/99". If I use the latter, it installs OK, but I've still got a "Mass Storage Device" in the Device Manager with a red mark beside it. If I use the former (which seems to be the most likely anyway) it does install the driver correctly. Unfortunately, what happens then is that messages pop up saying the system has found "Removable USB Disk" which sounds very hopeful, but then it pops up another message saying found "USB Disk" and the system freezes. No response at all with the mouse and keyboard completely dead. I have to hard reset, and if I then plug the pen drive in, the same sequence repeats, followed by a system freeze again. I've tried reinstalling the pen drives own Windows 98 driver software, and that now doesn't work either, even after uninstalling NUSB. It does sound much more correct for the device to be a "Removable USB Disk" rather than just a "Disk Drive" which is what I was getting before. I doubt that was the right type of drive, which is probably why it wouldn't let me assign any drive letters. It was possibly being detected as a fixed disk, which I think in Windows 98 you can only assign drive letters to using fdisk. Any more suggestions? Thanks, Dave.

Well I've done a lot of web research on this problem, but without any definite conclusions. My USB pen drive has the same problem now, it's detected as two disk drives (it's partitioned) but no drive letters assigned and apparently no way of assigning any! "Removable" is unchecked by default on all the drives, and "int 13 unit" is checked and greyed out on all of them. I've tried changing them to removable drives (which surely they should be) and forcing "int 13 unit" off by editing the registry. Nothing makes any difference though, still no drive letters appear in the "Reserved drive letters" dropdowns. I also have a USB Iomega ZIP drive, and I removed it from the USB devices too. When I reconnected that it worked fine, it appears as a drive, and drive letters can be assigned to it. So how come that works, and the other drives don't? I'd love to be able to "restore my system" but this is Windows 98, not ME with a "System Restore" facility! This has got to be something really simple, everything including NUSB seems to be working perfectly, including a "Stop Hardware" icon in the system tray like Windows 2000, which I've never seen before! It's just the drive letter assignment that isn't working, almost like they're the wrong sort of drives or something. I've tried updating the drivers on the drives (it says no driver files have been loaded for them) and it says I'm already using the best driver (DISKDRV.INF) for them. The drives are appearing in Device Manager just as "Disk drive". Should they be appearing as something else, like "Removable drive"? I can't remember what they appeared as before....... Any more ideas anyone?

Thanks guys! I've managed to get it to work now up to a point. The problem was being caused by some old card reader software that I hadn't uninstalled, doh! NUSB has now installed properly, and my card reader is being recognised correctly. The only thing still not right is that the card reader is shown as a Mass Storage Device in Device Manager and has generated four new disk drives, which is what I would expect. They don't appear in My Computer though, as they have no drive letters assigned to them. If I try to assign drive letters to them using Device Manager, there are no drive letters shown in the drop-down boxes, they are completely blank! How on earth do I resolve that?! Cheers, Dave.

I've just bought a card reader that reads six different types of camera storage cards. It's branded Jessops (a photographic chain here in the UK) and is labelled "All in One". Its system requirements needless to say do not include Windows 98, but they do include Windows ME and above. I've been trying to get the wretched thing to work on Windows 98SE, but with no luck so far. I have most of the bells and whistles from here installed on my Win98 system, Gape's Service Pack, and all the latest Auto Patcher updates. The one thing I don't have installed is KernelEx, as I've never needed it. The card reader is detected as a "Mass Storage Device" as I would expect, but the drivers won't load. It has a yellow mark against it in Device Manager, and it says "Error 10", which from my researches is totally meaningless (Error 10 means that the system doesn't know what the error is - very helpful!) I have tried installing NUSB 3.3 to see if that helped, but no joy. I had a very basic USB 2.0 driver installed before, but NUSB looks much better, and includes a lot of generic drivers for devices including card readers. Unfortunately, none of them seem to work with this reader! Were it a Windows 2000 and above only compatible device, I would probably just shrug my shoulders and give up at this point, but it does claim to be supported under Windows ME, so surely it should be possible to get it to work under Windows 98SE! Anyone any suggestions for anything else I could try? Thanks in anticipation. Dave.

Thanks Ninho! I had wondered what some of those files' functions actually were, and it's interesting to know that they're not all files directly related to IE6. I have DirectX 9.0c installed on Windows 98SE and Windows 2000, but the Windows 98 version is the August 2007 update, and the Windows 2000 version is the November 2008 update. I couldn't get the November 2008 update to install on Windows 98 (although the MS download site says that it should be compatible) it just throws up an "internal error" message (whatever that means!) and won't install. The saga is here - http://www.msfn.org/board/directx-9-0c-use...&hl=DirectX I assume subsequent versions have the same problem. It's never been a problem copying all those files across from Windows 2000 to Windows 98, apart from the time before last anyway! BTW, I've just noticed in your snip from my old post that I put "enseng.dll". That was a typo of course, it should be "inseng.dll" in case anyone's puzzled!

Yes, I can confirm that! I copied the files from the new KB974455 Cumulative IE6 Hotfix across to my Windows 98 installation, thinking that it would "never work" because the last one didn't, and to my utter astonishment, it did work! It looks as if whatever MS did to the shlwapi and mshtml dlls to break Windows 98 compatibility has been fixed. I don't believe for one moment that this was done for Windows 98 compatibility reasons of course, but whatever the reason was, I'm really pleased!

That's exactly the CD I've got too, and yes, it has its own key.

I've got one of those upgrade CDs and it came with a home networking package. I only bought it for the Win98 upgrade CD, I never even put the other one with the networking software into my drive as I didn't need it! I assume that the upgrade from 98FE to 98SE was needed by that software, which is why it was bundled with it.

I would strongly advise against doing that unless there is no other resort! The first thing it will do is destroy all your long file names. I, of course, found this out a few years ago, the hard way because I didn't think first.

There isn't actually a list anywhere, but the files I copy across are the files that all the IE6 SP1 Cumulative Security Update packages seem to replace. They are - browseui.dll, cdfview.dll, danim.dll, dxtmsft.dll, dxtrans.dll, iepeers.dll, enseng.dll, jsproxy.dll, mshtml.dll, msrating.dll, mstime.dll, pngfilt.dll, shdocvw.dll, shlwapi.dll, urlmon.dll, and wininet.dll. They all reside in the windows\system folder (system32 on NT based systems of course). I have always just copied them across (easy on a dual boot system) and never had any problem with any of them until now. I wouldn't have thought that re-registering was necessary as you're just replacing the file with another of exactly the same name.

Yes. The way that the batch files are written, you have complete control over what you choose to install or not to install. In fact, once you've unpacked the files, you can browse the Auto-Patcher folders and find the installation files yourself and run them from there if you want to.

Thanks Gape!

Glad it's now OK!

If you have put the gdiplus.dll file into your windows\system folder, all you should need to do it type "regsvr32 gdipthms.dll" (without the quote marks) into the "run" box and hit "OK". It that what you're doing?

No, I don't use KernelEx, because I mainly use Windows 2000 nowadays and therefore haven't thought it necessary to enhance Windows 98 so I can run non-Windows 98 programs on it. Good thought though, and I'd be interested to know if anyone else who does use it has the same problem with the latest IE files.

Before I start, I want to make it quite clear that I don't want any lectures about how I shouldn't be using IE6! I'm well aware of the much better and more secure alternatives, in fact I use Opera for most of my web needs (including posting this!) I do still occasionally use IE for some sites which break in other browsers, and what I'm going to say is relevant to Windows Explorer as well as Internet Explorer. Thank you! I have a dual boot system with Windows 2000 and Windows 98SE. Since MS dropped support for Windows 98, I have been trying to keep my copy of IE6 SP1 on Windows 98 patched as best I can using the files offered by Windows Update for IE6 SP1 on Windows 2000. This has worked successfully up until now, the last successful transplant being achieved with the files from KB969897. However, with the latest update (KB972260) this no longer seems to work. When I copied the usual 16 files from the cumulative update across to the Windows 98 system folder, Windows 98 would no longer start properly. The desktop appeared, but the taskbar just flashed up momentarily and then disappeared. The startup then went no further, with only a few things running. After a lot of very tedious trial and error, I discovered that this was being caused by the new shdocvw.dll file. If I went back to the previous version Windows would at least start up OK. Unfortunately things still weren't right. Windows Explorer wouldn't show its web view at all, and Internet Explorer wouldn't show any web sites, instead crashing out to a "this is potentially dangerous, do you want to open or save it" (or words to that effect) dialogue. After more tedious investigation, this turned out to be due to the new mshtml.dll file. Again restoring the old version made it come good. So at the moment I have all the new files from KB972260 except shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll, which are from KB969897. I merely report this as an observation, as I know that some people are trying to keep Windows 98 patched with Windows 2000 security patch files. For the record, the last mshtml.dll file that seems to work with Windows 98 is 6.0.2800.1627. The latest version, 6.0.2800.1634, does not work. Likewise, the last shdocvw.dll file that seems to work with Windows 98 is 6.0.2800.1972. The latest version, 6.0.2800.1983, does not work, and will stop the system starting properly in my experience. Can anyone else confirm my findings? I have no idea what MS have done to these files to finally break compatibility with Windows 98 after all this time, but I would be interested to know if anyone does find out!

Finally found what's causing the problem, but not found the actual reason for it! It's my virus scanner! I use a (very old) anti-virus program from Trend, PC-cillin 2002. Like most it has a "real-time scan" function, and it was that which was causing the problem. If I switch it off, everything returns to normal. Fortunately you can set it to ignore particular files or folders, so I can just exclude the problem ones from being scanned. All I want to know now is why it has suddenly started doing this when I've been using it for years without any problem!